A
desert island is simply any uninhabited
island: the word "desert" is
a reference to the island's deserted status,
and does not necessarily imply arid desert
weather. Such islands are commonly invoked
in metaphor, literature, and the popular
imagination. The quintessential desert
island novel is Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson
Crusoe. It is likely that Defoe took inspiration
for Crusoe from a Scottish sailor named
Alexander Selkirk, who was rescued in
1709 after four years on the uninhabited
Juan Fernández Islands: Defoe usually
made use of current events for his plots.
Other significant novels set on desert
islands include The Swiss Family Robinson,
The Coral Island, Lord of the Flies and
The Beach. The theme of being stranded
on a desert island has inspired films,
such as Cast Away, and TV series, like
Lost and the comedy Gilligan's Island.
It is also the driving force behind reality
shows like Survivor.
In
the popular conception, such islands are
often located in the Pacific, tropical,
uninhabited and usually uncharted. They
are remote locales that offer escape and
force people marooned or stranded as castaways
to become self-sufficient and essentially
create a new society. This society can
either be utopian, based on an ingenious
re-creation of society's comforts (as
in Swiss Family Robinson and, in a humorous
form, Gilligan's Island) or a regression
into savagery (the major theme of both
Lord of the Flies and The Beach). Lost
makes this explicit with characters named
John Locke and Danielle Rousseau, named
for John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
both of whom were social contract philosophers
who dealt with the relationship between
nature and civilization. Locke believed
that, in the state of nature, all men
had equal right to punish transgressors;
to ensure fair judgment for all, governments
were formed to better administrate the
laws. Rousseau, on the other hand, argued
that man is born weak and ignorant, but
virtuous nonetheless; only after man develops
society does he become wicked.
|
|
